Cat cafes have been a tourist draw for years. At the Tiganjica Ethno-Village resort outside Stajićevo, about 50 kilometers north of Belgrade, owner Zoran Ostojin is betting on a bigger, fluffier animal to pull coffee drinkers off the highway: alpacas.
Six of them now wander freely between tables at the resort's new cafe, which opened in late September, according to an Associated Press dispatch published Sept. 30 and picked up widely across U.S. outlets. The AP called it "a rare sight in Europe," and Euronews's follow-up report a week later confirmed the concept has already drawn curious visitors well beyond the immediate area.
Ostojin told the AP he got the idea after visiting a similar alpaca cafe in Slovakia with his wife. Bookings must be made in advance, and the roughly €10 entry fee includes a drink for the visitor and a bucket of carrots, lettuce and apples to feed the animals — with guests cautioned not to approach from behind or offer their own food instead. One of the resort's animal carers, Simona Frangi, gave reporters a rundown of the herd's personalities: Ljubica, a black alpaca, has a reputation as the grump of the group, while a smaller animal named Snežana nonetheless runs the herd.
The two wire accounts differ slightly on supporting details — the AP traces the resort's first alpaca to a gift from the Belgrade Zoo eight years ago, while Euronews names a different animal, Mona, as the group's largest — small discrepancies typical of parallel coverage of the same opening rather than any dispute about the cafe itself.
For Tiganjica, the appeal is straightforward commercial logic: a novelty that photographs well, travels on social media, and gives a countryside resort a reason to pull in day-trippers who might otherwise drive straight past. Serbia's tourism sector has leaned increasingly on themed, Instagrammable attractions in recent years, and an alpaca herd roaming between espresso cups is a relatively low-cost way to generate exactly that kind of word of mouth.
Whether the format outlasts the initial wave of coverage is, as with most novelty cafes, a question of maintenance as much as marketing — alpacas eat, shed and occasionally spit, regardless of how many visitors show up to admire them.
